McCarty DavidAdvertising on banners has already gone out of fashion; now the main way to attract audiences is social networks. The main thing here is to correctly present yourself and your product, because this will directly affect sales. How to increase brand awareness and why is competent SMM so important? Let’s talk to the specialists of the reputation agency Topface Media.
Social media promotion goals
The main goal of promotion on social networks is to increase sales. Based on what your customers post and search for, you can correctly determine their needs and wishes. The most suitable tool for identifying such details is targeting. It will help the brand separate its target audience from other network users. Creating company pages on several sites allows old customers to continue making purchases on sites that are more relevant to them, and correctly selected advertising tools attract new users.
You should also not completely rely on targeting, because no one has canceled communication with audiences, and audience feedback is difficult to overestimate. Many brands needlessly remain silent and do not communicate with their subscribers, thereby only alienating potential customers. No one will go to the trouble of calling the support service or writing a letter to the official email; most likely the user will give preference to your competitors who answer questions directly in the comments under the post.
A brand needs social networks to make communication with its audience accessible and simple. This is done through:
- Comments
- Private messages
- News posts
- Actively
- available in stories
Publish useful materials, involve users in the life of the brand, then they will want to follow you and learn more about your product. Inform about discounts, sweepstakes and promotions – this will increase not only activity, but also loyalty to your audience. Don’t ignore your customers, communicate with them, increasing brand trust. After all, if a company interacts with its target audience, then it is easier to trust it.
Increase your company’s awareness. As we said, promotion on various Internet platforms attracts new customers. Most often this is done through advertising, including viral advertising. Only well-integrated advertising with memorable content can provide you with large coverage and flow of customers. Moreover, this method does not require large financial costs or any serious effort. If you approach the issue wisely, the content will be able to hook users, they will begin to forward it to friends and post it in stories, thereby increasing the awareness of your brand – user-generated content is absolutely free, but a very effective tool for attracting new audiences. Of course, you shouldn’t rely everything on viral advertising – this tool is not for frequent use. Still, do not neglect targeting and regular advertising from partners, bloggers or media accounts.
When starting a business, you should not forget that your reputation must be protected from the first days, because, by and large, this is all that a brand has. Having lost your reputation, you can put an end to your business. Your position, communication with your audience and the nature of your posts influence how users feel about your product. Therefore, having active, live brand pages on social networks and active communication with the community will have a positive effect on your reputation.
Advantages and features of SMM
Now let’s talk about the benefits of SMM. Perhaps the main advantage of such brand promotion is that through social networks you can find absolutely any audience for small and medium-sized businesses. Benefits of social networks:
The opportunity to gain a competitor’s audience by showing advertising to your target audience with similar characteristics and interests;
Wide audience reach, which can reach several million;
Availability of feedback and communication with the client. This can become not only a way to level out the negative, but also a method of identifying shortcomings in order to eliminate them;
You can present information about the brand not only in an advertising manner, but also as informational and entertainment content, which, by the way, the audience has much more confidence in;
It is possible to set up advertising so that you pay only for the result, and not for placement;
Availability of targets by geolocation, gender, interests, social status, income level;
Functionality to increase the reputation and recognition of the company. You can read more about the role of social networks in creating and managing brand reputation in the article.
Stages of brand promotion on social networks
Promoting a company on social networks is not a quick task. You should not assume that launching one promotion per year will increase sales and customer flow significantly and for a long time. It is very important to maintain a connection with the audience by managing communication through different channels. The process involves the following stages:
1 Collection of detailed information
Before launching an advertising campaign on social networks, you need to give specialists the opportunity to study the target audience, competitors, as well as the portrait and TOV of the brand. The effectiveness of the following steps depends entirely on the amount of data received.
2 Strategy development
After receiving the necessary information, specialists create a long-term brand promotion plan, which specifies goals, indicators and results to achieve. Then the technical specifications are written and the campaign is transferred to the content makers.
3 Content creation and advertising launch
In order for an advertising campaign to bring the expected result, it is necessary to create high-quality and interesting content. This concept includes: ad text, unique photographs, videos.
4 Analysis of results
Regular testing of the effectiveness of working tools is essential. For example, by analyzing user activity on recent posts, you can understand what content is most interesting to users.
For a successful result, promotion must begin with analysis:
1 Your target audience and its characteristics: learn more about its interests, needs and characteristics.
2 The level of competition, demand and supply of the product/service, and also do not forget about trends.
3 All social networks. Their features and promotion tools that can contribute to brand development.
Promotion methods
SMM is a vast area in which there is a large selection of tools and promotion methods, which is not typical for other channels. These methods include:
1 Targeted advertising
2 Newsletters
3 Advertising in other communities and groups
4 Creating your own brand community
Targeted advertising
The main difference between targeted advertising and regular advertising is the department
Dividing the target audience from all other users. This is done to minimize non-target impressions. For example, if you sell auto parts, then your target audience is men 25+ who have a car or their own auto repair shop. Therefore, there is no point in showing your advertisement to young students who are interested in showrooms and coffee shops. Of course, there is a possibility that someday a student will want to open her own car service center, but the share of non-targeted impressions in this segment of the target audience will be large, which will negatively affect the effectiveness of advertising.
Targeting allows you to select the desired segment of users and focuses on them. Different social networks have different targeting, however, there are several standard parameters: location, age, gender, interests. Despite the differences in the settings of targeted advertising, the algorithm of actions is the same in all social networks: creating an advertising campaign, creating an ad, setting up a target audience.
Newsletters in private messages and mentions in comments
This method is quite dubious, but it has a right to exist. The result of spam is very controversial; at a minimum, users perceive the mailings negatively. They rarely respond to such messages, and social network moderators may block you if they receive a large number of complaints. Companies use mailings only because it is cheap. You can learn more about how spam can ruin your business here.
Advertising in third-party communities
To advertise in communities, you need to choose the right group, create high-quality content and create an ad that suits the target audience of the public. You can post in thematic communities every week or limit yourself to publishing a few posts in large groups. However, this method loses to the target, since the budget here is spent on placement, and not on clicks from interested users.
Create your own community
Regardless of promotion methods, a brand needs to have its own page on a social network. It is especially important to have a brand page on the network where promotion is taking place. To build trust in your brand, users must have the opportunity to read information about the company, write you a kind comment, or express dissatisfaction. Having pages on social networks allows you to use any of the promotion methods.
Conclusion
Social networks are an ideal platform for brand promotion. A variety of tools helps create recognition for even the smallest company. However, SMM is not so simple: to properly set up an advertising campaign and achieve effectiveness, certain skills are required. You may not be able to achieve the desired result the first time, but you always have the opportunity to trust a specialist.
